


keep me close, love me most

by backlit (cuimhl)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Character Study, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, M/M, Marriage Proposal, Non-Linear Narrative, lapslock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-07
Updated: 2017-12-07
Packaged: 2019-02-11 14:05:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12936870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuimhl/pseuds/backlit
Summary: tooru shoves the guitar back into tetsurou’s lap, and folds his arms. “you play it. i prefer listening to you play, anyway.”acquiescing, tetsurou strums a tune absently with easy chords. he’s thinking about sunlight and brown hair, ochre eyes, and autumn. they sit companionably in the quiet room with afternoon sunshine tumbling through the window, tooru’s shoulder pressed against tetsurou’s, their ankles crossed together.(a relationship study of sorts, awkward boys painfully in love.)





	keep me close, love me most

**Author's Note:**

> note: an episodic excerpt from my favourite au, where oikawa is a part-time astronomy student and a ballet dancer recuperating from a knee injury, while kuroo is a chem/lit major with an interest in music (and bokuto owns a small dance studio)
> 
> title: someone to stay - vancouver sleep clinic

 

perhaps it’s surprising to anyone who knows them, but tetsurou-and-tooru’s relationship is a very quiet one.

if one were to take kuroo tetsurou, provocation expert unapologetic about airing his opinions and insults, pitch him together with oikawa tooru who is childishly petty but otherwise known for much of the same, it would make sense to think that they would get along like a house on fire and destroy everything in their wake.

truthfully, they do, a lot of the time; there’s a reason why they, along with bokuto, are never invited to parties wishing to keep any semblance of propriety. but together,  tetsurou feels safe in a way he didn’t really expect, least of all with tooru.

tooru is dramatically averse to vulnerability, tetsurou is aware of this — but so is he. sometimes he catches tooru hunched over his coursework, brows furrowed in frustration when an assignment fails to surrender the same thrill of intellectual discovery that he seems to thrive on, and tetsurou swallows the urge to lecture him about the unproductive self-criticism carved so clearly in the slump of his figure. instead, he pulls him to bed a little earlier. smooths the hair back from tooru’s face and kisses his forehead, holds his hand under the blanket. doesn’t say anything if tooru curls into him in defeat, as they fall asleep together.

because there are other days when tooru unlocks the apartment door to find tetsurou outside, smile watery and hands tired as he reaches for tooru’s sweater and pulls him close. the first time, tooru had stiffened awkwardly in his arms and whispered hoarsely, “i don’t know what i’m doing.”

huffing a breath of exasperated fondness, tetsurou had tucked his head into the crook of tooru’s neck and murmured back, “just do what you would want someone to do for you.”

and tooru had drawn him in tighter, rubbed circles against tetsurou’s back and manoeuvred them carefully out of the doorway. “couch?” his voice had been gentle, pliant as sunwarmed honey against the shell of tetsurou’s ear.

tetsurou had exhaled, shuddery but grateful. “no, bedroom,” he had replied. “i think maybe a nap.”

“do you want company?”

tooru had felt so solid, so secure against tetsurou; the answer was obvious. “if — if you don’t mind? but i’ll be okay, so —”

“so i’ll join you,” tooru had pulled back to smile at him decisively. the wicked glint of his usual smile had gentled into citrus, and his kiss had been tentative reassurance. “we can worry about dinner later.”

the bed had been cold and that had been a bit of a deterrent, but tooru pushed back the covers and punched their pillows, settling down on one side of the bed like half a set of parentheses, looking patiently up at tetsurou. curling up beside him had been by far the easiest thing he’d had to do all day, from waking up to dragging himself home.

and perhaps the sequence changes, perhaps there are worse times when tooru bites back a sob but his shoulder still shake, or when tetsurou can’t quite meet tooru’s gaze as he trudges to the bedroom and is surprised, in a numb but pleasant way, when tooru climbs in with him. neither of them really like to talk about those moments — what matters is that they get each other through them, right?

possibly they’re accumulating unknowns to risk an unsteady future, but tetsurou would disagree. with the weight of tooru’s arm slung loosely over tetsurou’s waist, his breathing quiet and warm against tetsurou’s cheek, the language of the unspoken that they share is too clear, too wonderful, to be a weakness.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


there is something small and afraid in everyone, and tooru’s was what drew tetsurou to him in the first place.

that shiver of self-doubt, a meteorite insecurity flitting through his steadfast gaze — it still illuminates everything in its path, and plunges to devastation when it skirts too close to home. there’s a tooru who drags tetsurou to karaoke clubs on a thursday night and goads them both into drinking until hanamaki or bokuto have to drive them home, the same one who fights tetsurou with every inch of serious muscle over milk bread, or the one who hogs the television remote to force feed him awful alien movies and who mocks tetsurou's fragile self-control by wearing miniskirts around the apartment while tetsurou is studying for an exam.

and there’s a tooru who inhales the scent of tetsurou’s hair and holds him shyly, speaks with words that emerge skittish and afraid of being kicked, folds under tetsurou’s touch and seems too soft to stand upright again. the one who clamps his mouth shut against a plaintive whisper after tetsurou tucks him into an early night, eyes glinting dully in the sweep of shadows.

 _stay_ , he never says. sometimes tetsurou doesn’t hear it, and sometimes he does. invites tooru into his arms as they fit together in the very best way, fall together into the dark and hold hands until they manage to find their way out.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


tooru might be a fast learner, but it doesn’t mean he learns how to take care of another human being just by doing it once. selfishness and avoidance are separate things: one is deliberate, like when tooru wallows in self-victimisation or ignores tetsurou’s calls and texts while they’re fighting, stretching his patience gossamer-thin to tempt an explosion, just because he can. but the other is more timid, and often more painful, because they appraise the vulnerability with the same sense of helplessness, wanting to fix but not knowing how.

the hardest part is that he _tries._ in the months leading up to finals, tooru starts buying coffee for both of them without tetsurou asking, because he had noticed that during midterms tetsurou had lost some of his control over the mundane, regular duties of life, and suffered for it. he stops skipping out on dish duty, offers to cook more often, and types his essays next to tetsurou on the bed, because he knows that tetsurou values the physical reassurance of support.

it’s not exactly that tooru _doesn’t_ like taking responsibility for another person. tetsurou himself doesn’t really know how to articulate the shroud of unease that tooru gathers around him sometimes — he can only ever catch glimpses of what he thinks might be the heart of the issue.

hair silvered by a dusting of rain, his lashes damp and lips pale, tooru stands under the wet starlight of a sky cleft into fragments of raincloud and ocean blue, his hands outstretched to collect water in the well of his palm as it drips from the roof. his voice is meditative, a little sad.

“stars _do_ twinkle. because they are further away than planets and are so bright, the atmosphere between them and us distorts their glow, like tarmac on a hot day wavering in the distance. sirius is low on the horizon in the winter, so there’s more atmosphere to travel through. it’s more obvious that it’s twinkling, see?”

he points: “orion’s belt, and then canis major.”

the star _is_ twinkling, flickering like a candleflame or a heat shimmer. tooru talks about stars like he wants to be one, always with wistful wonder suppressed half-heartedly by a mask of indifference. like a little prince who misses his rose, or a star displaced far away from home.

tetsurou kisses him, quiet and slow. “sometimes i don’t know where i end, and where you begin,” tooru confesses into the cavern of his mouth, breath warm but hands cold. “sometimes i don’t know what is being selfish and what is choosing _me_.”

 _me too,_ tetsurou thinks. he looks at tooru, and tooru looks back. _i know_ , his gaze whispers. they understand this struggle as much as they do the starlight in their bones, the iron in winedark marrow just like the hearts of dead stars, suffering core-collapse supernovae in the distant unknown to expel stellar material and nurture with gentle hands the embers of new stars born to silence.

protostars are made from hydrogen clouds that condense due to gravitational pull. what about the gravity between tetsurou and tooru? if they are ploughing gently through hydrogen nucleosynthesis now, are they destined to be a white dwarf or a wolf-rayet? will they explode and outshine galaxies? will they survive?

some things don’t have answers, only theories, like the proposed existence of planet nine. some things only exist in abstraction, because they contradict each other linguistically, or the superimposition of contrasting images creates a paradoxical illusion. tooru _doesn’t_ care about what other people think of him, but he _does._ he wants to dismantle a person’s defenses, their brittle veneer of likeability until they shatter, yet tooru melts when they smile. tooru isn’t kind, but he is gentle.

if tetsurou is too tired to talk but too awake to fall asleep, tooru mimes alien battles across the stretch of pillow between them. he walks his hands across the linen and mouths explosions, sticking fingers up in rude innuendos while insisting they are lightsabers, and kisses tetsurou when he laughs. he claims it’s untrue, but tetsurou has vague recollections of tooru carding his fingers through tetsurou’s hair as he drifts off, although tetsurou is guilty of the same in return.

of course, few people can frustrate him as much or as easily as tooru, too. they bicker over the smallest things — “why didn’t you pick up milk on the way home?”

“i didn’t get your text!”

“you should have checked, you should check every day!”

or even: “what happened to good morning kisses?”

“i hadn’t realised you were waiting for my attention with such rapt devotion.”

and, always, “why are you still working? it’s —” tetsurou checks his phone blearily, “three AM. your exam is in _two days_ , you need to _sleep_ properly.”

“stop mothering me,” tooru’s frown is sour; he’s looking to pick a fight. that shouldn’t be unusual — tooru is often, if not always, looking to pick a fight when he senses the opportunity to defend himself. the problem is that there are two main modes of belligerence that he possesses: the first is when he is sad and tired, in which case it’s easier for tetsurou to ignore the customary insults. the second is when he is frustrated, which often transmutes into anger, and tetsurou finds it much more difficult to deal with this side, because he involuntarily absorbs all the negative energy and mistakes it for his own.

the frightening thing about tooru’s anger is that it cools to ice when he is serious, and his impassive look of disappointment thunders through tetsurou’s heart like a freak storm. they are both privately sensitive people. unimpeachable enthusiasm and self-confidence is incomprehensible to the two of them; from the burdens of expectation and perfectionism, to the fear of inadequacy and constant struggle with the consequences of perspicacity, neither tetsurou nor tooru have ever really known how it is to trust wholeheartedly the answers they hold within themselves.

thus a cruel tooru can trigger all of tetsurou’s defenses. communication becomes impossible between the self-protection measures they built long ago, and which they are rarely forced to use except around each other.

once, they stopped talking for a month. tooru packed his toiletries and moved to iwaizumi’s dormitory, while bokuto came to stay with tetsurou. it had been difficult; there were habits neither could grow out of, from sleeping all tangled together to share warmth, to movie nights, play-fights over takeaway options, even a long-standing argument that tetsurou was tempted to initiate, again, about pineapple on pizza when bokuto suggested ordering.

their friends were wonderful people, of course, _of course_. but seeing tooru around campus or carrying his stereo into the studio to stretch, complete his exercises at the barre while ignoring tetsurou as he accompanies the children’s ballet class, pretending to be strangers, missing the clasp of tooru’s hand in his own — they’re as bad at being together peacefully as they are at staying away from each other.

and tetsurou truly, truly believes that they are getting better at both, for the sake of a healthy relationship. but of course, it was never a question, whether tooru was good for him or not in the very beginning; they didn’t have a meet-cute or a meet-ugly or anything. they just gravitated to each other, like planets in adjacent orbits that barely scraped by each other for the first time and realised how much separation ached like a wound; between study sessions and coffee half-dates and bokuto’s dance studio, stealing glances, running fingers over the grooves of old type across the spine of an unfamiliar book, but recognising it immediately by touch and smell and sound.

tooru _is_ good for him. tetsurou is good for _tooru_ , too. they can feel the weight of something warm and timid fluttering to rest against the flowering of hearts, bridging the space of breaths with open hands, ribcages blossoming like rows of sunflowers in the mouth of a summer morning in acres and acres of gold.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


tooru is a collection of ballet feet and polaroids: chipped nails and crooked toes, raised veins like blue train tracks across pale skin, the vaporous haze of red-eye against the smog of a blurred photograph pinched between rough fingers. there is always something light and frail and distant about him, which might be why tetsurou is so intent on holding on tightly when he can.

“do you want a private dance, tetsu?”

tooru breaks away from their kiss, reading the way that tetsurou is heaving for breath and the possessive grip of his hand on tooru’s waist.

“only if you're offering,” tetsurou sits back on the end of the bed, tilting his head back at a provocative angle to bare the golden line of his throat.

tooru swallows, smiles. “I wouldn't have asked if I wasn't planning on it,” he winks, smoothing his hands down to the slope of his hips, rolling onto the balls of his feet by habit.

there's a nervous tension in tooru’s movements, a certain hesitance about the way he lifts his hands above his head to roll his hips forward, almost as though his arms are itching to close over his chest in retreat. it evades tetsurou, truthfully, how tooru can be so unsure when he is standing there untouchably beautiful, but in a way he can sympathise. vulnerability has never not been difficult for either of them, and even this is hard — but carefully, deliberately, tetsurou rests a hand over his groin and forces himself not to look away as tooru dances, giving into the drag of heat that gathers in the pit of his stomach. he's almost breathless as he mumbles, “you drive me crazy,” fingers curling against his thigh to stifle a gasp.

tooru takes confidence from this. his gaze sharpens and the anxiety lifts from his shoulders as he dances with a torturous fluidity, shifting from a body roll into a kind of compositional ballet. tetsurou doesn't recognise most of the actions, but there are a few he recalls tooru telling him about: an attitude into a pirouette, toes pointed as tooru mimes pulling tetsurou towards him and laughs, his voice light and airy.

the way he moves his body is smooth as unbroken water, seductive in the arch of his brow and the knowing smile that curls, enticing and filed sharp with an unspoken challenge. tetsurou can’t breathe.

when tooru finally steps within reach again, tetsurou laces his hand with tooru’s and pulls him onto the bed, but isn’t quite sure what tooru is interested in doing tonight. he’s flexible, which is cute, but tooru is hardly someone to push around; it seems he has something else in mind this time in particular, as he flips tetsurou onto his back and kisses him until he can’t think, until he is a mess of shivers and stammering heartbeat and lost composure, until he is begging for tooru to put him back together.

tooru likes to go fast, but tetsurou prefers to go slow. privately, he thinks tooru prefers it as well, just doesn’t want to admit it. because when tooru holds him down, presses him into the bed and moves painfully slowly, working a chain of butterfly kisses from his cheekbone to his ribcage to his knee, there’s something indescribably fond in his gaze that burns like fire bottled in glass: brilliant but fragile in the quaver of spidersilk, or the ripple of _aurora borealis_ , or a taste of summer in the hollow, subdued stillness of winter.

and tetsurou burns with him, ignites in a _whoosh_ of wind and feels himself staggering to life even as he struggles and aches under tooru’s searing touch, always on the precipice of incineration like a moth drawn too close to the allure of a flame. tooru makes him desperate and fearless at the same time, makes him beg until he cries but secure, always, in the knowledge that tooru is _there_ and will always be — even just for a moment, just for now — and if they are together, everything will be okay.

he won’t tell tooru this, but more than anything else, it was the look in his eyes that pushed him over the edge: to a free-fall, weightless and terrified and euphoric, unafraid to land. tooru kisses him later like he knows, lips a little chapped and hands unsteady. tetsurou wouldn’t be surprised if he did. how they fell in love could be a mystery to everyone else in the universe, but it would remain the one constant and certainty they would always share.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


“third fret, first string. put your index finger on the second string of the second fret, there —”

tooru pouts, “you play it yourself. i bet you’re just trying to turn my hands into ugly guitarist hands, too, because you’re jealous, but i’m onto you! ballet feet are bad enough.”

tetsurou hums inquisitively, his smile playful. “that’s not what you said last night, when you were all like ‘tetsu-chan! your strong, manly, calloused hands! put them —’”

“shut _up_ ,” tooru snarls, flushing beautifully. to be fair, his hands are just as strong, and gender binaries are a socially-constructed ruse. he shoves the guitar back into tetsurou’s lap, and folds his arms. “you play it. i prefer listening to you play, anyway.”

acquiescing, tetsurou strums a tune absently with easy chords. he’s thinking about sunlight and brown hair, ochre eyes, and autumn. they sit companionably in the quiet room with afternoon sunshine tumbling through the window, tooru’s shoulder pressed against tetsurou’s, their ankles crossed together. see? quiet. it’s so easy to be with tooru like this.

on the windowsill, tooru’s cacti collection is showing signs of thirst and neglect. it is quite a feat to render cacti as gloomy as this, but tooru, serial killer of all other kinds of plants, is trying his best. hugged close to his chest, tooru’s favourite alien plushie stretches out a hand to bat at tetsurou’s hand, and he looks up to see tooru’s soft smile as he watches tetsurou play with the kind of unabashed affection he usually tries to hide.

sometimes, tooru sings for him. very rarely and generally reluctantly. but today, tooru opens his mouth without prompting and hums lightly over the rhythm of tetsurou’s strumming, makes up a passive aggressive love song that has tetsurou doubling over his guitar in laughter. tooru’s hand is gentle as he tilts tetsurou’s head up towards him, pressing their lips together in a chaste kiss. then he returns to singing, and tetsurou joins in until he starts butchering the harmony and is shoved sideways by tooru’s indignant plushie.

they collapse, laughing, on the bed and tooru’s hand roams up under tetsurou’s shirt and the mood changes, tetsurou’s breath hitches against tooru’s mouth and he sets the guitar down against the wall to climb back into bed and tackle tooru down against the mattress. they kiss like this: a mismatch of lips and half-swallowed breaths and warm hands, fingers interlaced as tetsurou makes love to tooru at two PM in the afternoon.

a storm blows in and dissipates not half an hour later, leaving the skies drowned in sulphurous yellow, and tooru stares up at tetsurou with this unreadable expression but he melts in tetsurou’s arms and unravels once, twice; they kick the sheets of the bed and sprawl in the centre together.

tetsurou-and-tooru is made of silence and sound, motion and stillness, a room full of their idiosyncratic collections and whispers of their names, fights and reconciliations. secretly, they’ve both thought about this a lot, but tooru is actually the one who gets there first —

he gets home from work one day, still in his leg warmers with his bag strap slipping down his shoulder. tetsurou is in the kitchen, cooking tooru’s favourite kind of kimchi spaghetti even though tetsurou personally doesn’t really enjoy it, but tooru’s face lights up when he sees, with the same excitement he gets around milk bread and tetsurou’s casual suggestions of sex, and it’s worth it, so worth it.

right then and there, tooru drops to one knee, face flushed from the cold outside and lips parted in a sharp exhale, and he fumbles with the pocket of his jacket while swearing about how embarrassing this is, how he can’t believe he’s messing up already, and tetsurou can only stand there in shock as the spaghetti sauce bubbles away on the stove.

“tetsu — tetsurou,” tooru breathes, his eyes wide. he looks like he might cry, he looks like he has a ten-thousand-word dissertation due the next day that he hasn’t started when he asks tetsurou for help with research. his hair is a mess from the wind outside, and vaguely, tetsurou remembers the time they went on a roadtrip down to a camping ground by the sea and tooru shrieked about the cruel wind that ruined his painstakingly-styled hair, but most importantly the way he looked when tetsurou kissed him over the dashboard, eyes dazed and lips pink like he was surprised that love even had a taste.

“tetsurou,” tooru tries again, “i — love you. i love you. i fell in love with your stupid, ugly hair the first time i saw you in that studio, but it wasn’t love at first sight, i just — it grew on me. i loved how awfully nerdy you sounded asking all these chemistry questions even though you looked like you belonged in a motorcycle gang.”

tetsurou chokes back a sob, feeling small and helpless and so, so in love that he can’t breathe. tooru continues, “i fell in love with the frown on your face, how hard you concentrated to play piano for the little kids, how you knew how to make me smile even when i — when i didn’t want to, even when i knew what you were trying to do.”

finally, he pulls out a small box and snaps it open, hands shaking. “i know we have, like, forever to say our vows at the altar or whatever, if you want to, but -- but i just wanted you to know that i love you, even when i get mad and especially how you’ve stuck with me all this time, because i know i can be really hard to love. but you do it, i don’t know how, and — would it be too much? could i —” tooru wipes his eyes angrily, but tetsurou notices in a distant sort of way that his nose is running, and he’s done nothing about it. barely aware of what he is doing, tetsurou pinches tooru’s nose with a tissue and realises that his hand is just as unsteady, trembling just as hard, and he has to laugh a little damply about how stupid they both look.

at the sound of his laughter, tooru swallows whatever he was about to say, and he stares up at tetsurou just like how the books say, like what movies try to show: like he is the only person in the world, the same way he looks at the stars but this time as though tetsurou is a man-shaped silhouette of them, all the billions and billions of stars gathered in his lean frame and tooru couldn’t look away even if he tried.

“could i,” he begins again, voice softer. “could i ask you to stick with me for a while longer? i’ve never wanted this, you, all of us, so much in my life. will you marry me?”

tetsurou coughs on an aborted sob, knowing he looks like a mess with all the tears streaming down his face but he doesn’t _care_. he runs forward and throws his arm around tooru, dragging him to his feet, holding on as tightly as he can because sometimes tooru seems a bit light and frail and distant, a collection of starlit smiles and sundrunk kisses, and tetsurou is in love.

“yes,” he mumbles into tooru’s neck, feeling him sag with relief against him. “i have a ring hidden in the wardrobe, stupid.”

this startles a laugh out of tooru, who pulls him even closer just shy of melting them both together into one alien, four-limbed body. “sorry i beat you to it,” he whispers, sounding unapologetic. “but does this mean you’ll take my surname?”

tetsurou squawks in mock offense. “no way,” he smiles. “but we can exchange surnames, if you want?”

“just you wait, i’ll bring you around,” tooru shakes his head. his hair tickles tetsurou’s neck. he still feels giddy, it’s really hard to believe that this just happened, but it _did_ and it’s everything he could have dreamed of, tears and runny noses and all.

“i love you,” tetsurou breathes him in. tooru smells like deodorant and musty studios, the faint floral perfume he likes to wear, and now, a bit of tetsurou too.

“i love you too,” tooru whispers back, and tetsurou can hear the smile in his voice.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


“oikawa tried to prevent me from making a speech at his wedding,” bokuto announces to the mirth of the entire congregation. it’s a small, private assembly, full of old friends and family, and already people are tearing up.

“obviously,” bokuto continues with a wicked grin, “it was because he didn’t want me to embarrass him about all the times he tried to ask me offhandedly about kuroo, because he hadn’t turned up to play piano for my ballet class.”

tetsurou jerks his head around to tooru, who is blushing beside him on the altar. “i didn’t know that,” he murmurs, and tooru blushes harder.

“shut up,” he hisses back.

“it was a little surprising, i’ll admit, to see how well they got along, not on a — a destructive level, but a constructive one.” bokuto looks pensive. “akaashi would be able to explain it better, but if you would only take a look at them, it’s painfully obvious. both kuroo and oikawa can be a pain to deal with, so i guess it’s easy to assume they’d just cause a lot of trouble for everyone involved. but —”

bokuto tears up, sniffing, and tetsurou follows immediately. this is _incredibly_ embarrassing; as tooru would say, he doesn’t want all the photos later to be of him looking puffy-eyed and red in the nose.

“but there was a time when oikawa took on all these impossible projects all at once, because he was insecure about his dancing, i guess. and everyone who had grown to know him even a little could tell that it would take a natural disaster to convince him to rest, even though he was working himself to death. but kuroo did it,” bokuto turns away from the podium to make finger guns at tetsurou, who does the same back, crying only a little bit. beside him, tooru stretches out a hand and takes tetsurou’s, and the turmoil of his insides settles slightly.

bokuto clears his throat. “so kuroo did it, and i was in awe although i knew how cool my best friend had the capacity to be, even though he acted like a three-year-old most of the time —”

“hey,” tetsurou gasps.

“ _but_ ,” bokuto ignores him, “it made sense afterwards, when i peeked into oikawa’s room and saw them sitting together in silence, looking at each other as though there was this conversation going on that i couldn’t hear. and i kind of knew that, some way or another, they’d be okay together. even though kuroo didn’t get his game together, and they didn’t start dating until ages afterwards! but they’re getting married now, so i suppose it’s fine. thanks for listening, and best wishes to the lovebirds.”

in the end, most of their friends clamour to make a speech, long or short, so tooru and tetsurou indulge them. most of the things they say are just humiliating, but it’s wonderful and sweet and tetsurou feels immensely grateful to have these friends by his side. tooru complains once about getting sore feet, standing for so long, but a smile flirts with the corner of his mouth and tetsurou can tell that he is enjoying this, too.

over the years, marriage with tooru is a very simple affair. they get to do domestic things without having to worry about getting their bank accounts mixed up, they qualify for a bit of financial aid, they still fight about stupid things and laugh about jokes that are even dumber.

it’s possible that even when they’re fifty, tetsurou is writing love songs and singing them off-key while tooru tries in vain to correct his pitch, and they still have great sex in the years that follow. maybe they adopt a kid. maybe they don’t.

everything comes down to the way they look at each other in their quiet moments, absorbed in different books across the room until they are drawn back together by an inexorable, magnetic force. it’s fine, like this. however many years lie ahead of them, tetsurou-and-tooru are ready for them. white dwarf or wolf-rayet, nothing can be too difficult if they have each other.

  


★ ☆ ★

  


“oikawa tooru, do you take kuroo tetsurou to be your lawfully-wedded husband?”

“i do.”

“and you, kuroo tetsurou, do you take oikawa tooru to be your lawfully-wedded husband?”

“i do.”

“you may now —”

and they kiss.

 

**Author's Note:**

> it's so flu f fy i'm really weak  
> actually, i'm a sappy astronomy nerd i'm sorry ,,, but if this made you smile a little, i'm glad!


End file.
